Margarete Himmler
Wife of the infamous SS leader Heinrich Himmler, Margarete Himmler started life on a very different path. Given her husband Heinrich directed the killings of countless people, it is ironic that Margarete initially trained as a nurse to help save lives in World War One. When the war ended, she moved to the German Red Cross hospital. Thanks to funding by her father, she was also able to direct a private nursing clinic. How you then end up married to one of the world’s most notorious killers is certainly a baffling question to tackle!
Margarete first met Heinrich in 1927 at one of his lecture tours. Owing to her blonde hair and blue eyes, Heinrich is said to have fallen in love immediately; they married one year later in July. Heinrich was worried to introduce Margarete to his Catholic parents – not only because he was seven years older than her but because she had been previously married and was a Protestant. Though she was eventually accepted, his family generally kept their distance. Margarete then gave birth to their only child, Gudrun, on the 8th August 1929.
Margarete was certainly not an innocent bystander in her husband’s doings. She joined the Nazi Party in 1928 and frequently hosted meetings with the wives of senior SS leaders. Despite this, she was generally disliked and during the Nuremberg Rally of 1938, she conflicted with these women and as a group, they refused to take directions from her. Further, once World War Two began, Margarete supervised German Red Cross hospitals but while on a trip to Poland wrote in a private diary that “this Jewish rabble… don’t look like human beings… it’s an incredible job trying to create order.”
In April 1945, Margarete and Heinrich Himmler saw one another for the last time before his death. They had separated years earlier, and in 1941 Margarete learned that Heinrich had secretly been engaged in a relationship with his secretary. He went on to father two children with her.
Once the war ended, several investigations were launched into Margarete to assess how likely it is that she knew of her husband’s business. She claimed to have no idea and sought to be de-nazified and held unaccountable for the crimes of her husband. Eventually, after years of debate, in 1953 she was classified as a beneficiary of the Nazi regime and sentenced to thirty days’ punitive work. With this classification, she also lost her right to vote, and the right to a pension.